Remarks by Professor Faith Smith, 2024 Grad Celebration
Good morning. It is a pleasure to share the podium with Zoë Rose, an esteemed CAST alum. Congratulations to all who are graduating today. And welcome supporters, friends, family, colleagues.
I was thinking that anyone scanning the list of CAST and cross-listed courses and events even just this semester alone would be struck by how much they might offer us to meet this tremendous, tumultuous, liberating and terrifying moment.
Looking at the courses that you have taken this semester, I wonder how they would frame events – on campuses across the country? Their very titles sometimes speak directly to our local, national and global moment.
- Will Chalmus’s “Provocative Art: Outside the Comfort Zone”
- Toni Shapiro-Phim’s “Dance and Migration”
- Toni Shapiro-Phim’s Project Design Practicum: “applies theories, skills, information and critical questions to a project that engages with social transformation in creative, practical, and ethically-sound ways.”
- Fernando Rosenberg’s “Literature, Film and human Rights in Latin America”
- Bradford Garvey’s Global Soundscapes: Performing Musical Tradition Across Time and Place”
- Christopher Frost’s “Culture Foundation”
- Camila Maroja’s “Museum Studies”
- Cameron Anderson’s “Multimedia and Video Design for Live Performance”
- Emilie’s Diouf’s “Women and War”
- Muna Guvenc’s “Approaches to Architecture and the City”
- Thomas Hall’s “improv Collective”
- Gustavo Herera Diaz’s “Staging Transgression: Latin Am Theater and Performance”
- Yuri Doolan’s “Performing Asian-American Women on Screen and Scene”
- Taylor Ackley’s “Protest Through Song: Music that Shaped America”
- Brandon Callender’s “Blackness and Horror”
- Peter Kalb, “Ecology and Art”
- Benjamin Pauldin’gs “Music and Dance from Ghana”
- Andie Berrys Global Theater: Voices from Asia, Africa and the Americas”
- Shoniqua Roach’s “Black Feminist Thought”
- Patricia Alvarez Astacio’s “Filming Culture: Ethnographic and Documentary Filmmaking”
As you can hear, in just the titles of some of the CAST courses this semester, we in the CAST community have been invited to think about the soundscapes of protest, for example – what are the songs and chants (thinking of Taylor Ackley’s course) that have reflected and shaped social protest over many generations? How does one set of sounds fall out of favor over time, and other set remain vivid? How is the same sound inspiring and dismaying?
And what about the architecture of the city? To return to the title of Muna’s course. What of those spaces where we thought police forces were off-limits? And which have reminded us that the same campus is always experienced very differently by differently embodied persons and different communities every single day? (And this is, then, the fiction that what ought to be off-limits to us here on campus is actually a routine experience of violation for many others. When 19-year-old Win Rozario called the police into his Queens home a few weeks ago, he was asking them to help him as he endured a mental crisis; and then in a scene that is all too familiar to us he was moving rapidly towards his own annihilation – a scene in which his mother and his brother repeatedly inserted their own bodies between him and the advancing state. Here I am thinking about our colleague Shoniqua Roach’s theorization of the “The Black Living Room” as a site of state surveillance and violence, even as it is fiercely and repeatedly reclaimed as a space of thriving.)
Space and architecture: How often in the past months have we had occasion to think of the city’s cars coming to a standstill as crowds insisting on justice moved through the city? Or the space of the tent? Tents on college campuses. Tents of the refugee camps of persons displaced from and within Gaza, from and within the Congo, from and within Sudan, for example?
Toni Shapiro-Pim’s “Dance and Migration” asks what it means to dance in fraught spaces – under fraught conditions – “in the aftermath of extreme violence and cultural dislocation.” I imagine that Gustavo Herera Diaz’s “Staging Transgression,” Yuri Doolan’s “Performing Asian American Women,” Emilie Diouf’s “Nigerian Movies in the World” and “Women at War,” Jennifer Cleary’s “Playing for Change” and Andie Berry’s “Global Theater” – among others, demonstrated those movements that are rehearsed across time – those rituals offered and libations poured – the way that movements on screen, or on stage, or at a street corner, invite the ancestors and the lwas to thrum among us, and at the same time expose the libation-pourer to a wider community’s confirmation – aha, we knew it; that is what they do; that is who they are; that is what makes them different, and undeserving.
Courses such as Prof Alvarez’s “Filming Culture,” I imagine, reflected on the capacity of images used in documentaries to show communities at their most vulnerable: we can think about images mobilized in the press and on social media: in makeshift hospitals; trying to catch food; being pulled from rubble; in utter terror at the prospect of impending sexual violence. These images are used to degrade: look what we made them do and become; even as they are also pressed into service as testimony: yes, it is true, this awful thing really did happen.
And as we wield numbers and dates to make our respective cases, we are trying to understand how these images do their work. Just as, in my own course, “Plotting Inheritance,” we tried to understand how fictional characters in all of their contradictory and confounding selves understood themselves as being part of or apart from successive generations of possession or dispossession. How do bodies hold these terrors over generations? How may we identify the archive of movement – those tremors and other gestures that frame these histories and desires? And where are those spaces in which joy may be discerned?
Some of your classes and projects have moved us to think directly about the land and our relationship to it. Those of you who hung red dresses around this campus – maybe three or four years ago – asked us to connect space and image and the body in very powerful ways. This was the RedDress project, a traveling installation by the Anishinaabe/Finnish artist Jamie Black asking us to attend to murdered and missing Indigenous women – thousands of women -- in North America – and in collaboration with Toni Shapiro-Phim’s class, and the Kniznick Gallery of the Women’s Studies Research Center.
I am thinking also of the plays and podcasts of Tom King’s “Performing Climate Justice” course, adapted for radio from scripts commissioned by the Climate Change Theater Action, and broadcast this semester on Brandeis campus radio.
And of Elizabeth Bradfield’s “Eco-Writing Workshop” a “creative writing workshop focused on essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns.” And of course I am thinking of our colleague, Berenson Postdoc Fellow in Indigenous Women, Genders and Sexualities, Evangelina Macias (Amskapi Pikuni and A’aninin) – connecting her body to trees not far from here. That evening of dance in early April featured an excerpt from “No Home but the Heart” by Daystar Rosalie Jones (Pembina Chippewa-Cree), followed by Eva’s dance work “Niiksokowaiks My Relatives” – in which a mother’s loving braiding, and a soul-destroying educational system were shown to be deeply felt in, and remembered by, the body. This work began in Goldfarb library, and moved outside. In those shimmering ribbons connecting the moving body to tree and to earth, we were invited to think about who and what we should name as our kin – as our caregivers, and as life for whom we are responsible. We were invited to reflect on – as you have in all of these courses, and in your own commitments on and beyond this campus – what it means to do and to make. What it means to have an archive. an inheritance. A space and a set of movements and rituals to count on – or to find ourselves creating new ones – or fashioning in the interim – as the ground is shifted beneath our feet.
Congratulations to you all. Best wishes as you continue to make what we do here mean something powerful in the world.